This is the article on the Rolling Stone website (link above) about T-pain’s defensiveness against other rappers using the Auto-Tune effect.

T-Pain is feeling fiercely territorial over his signature sexy robot sound, or more precisely, the Auto-Tune software that turns his voice into a cyborg croon — as heard on hits he’s produced or sung on, such as Kanye West’s “Good Life,” Flo Rida’s “Low” and his own “Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin’).”

“People I look up to, legends who don’t have to be using Auto-Tune, they using it!” says T-Pain, 22, sounding genuinely pissed off. The rapper takes out his frustration on copycats throughout his third album, Thr33 Ringz, due this fall. “F.U.” features brutal rock guitars and a scream-along chorus (”Fuck Yooooooou!“); on “Karaoke,” he asks for forgiveness from God before dissing what he calls “karaoke niggas”: “Your daughter told you to get off daddy’s dick!”

After passing on an invite to join Kanye’s tour, Pain recorded 36 songs in two months. “I go in the booth and whatever happens, happens,” he says. Other new cuts include “Chopped & Screwed,” Pain’s take on the slowed-down Houston sound, and the Lil Wayne-featuring “Can’t Believe It,” Thr33 Ringz‘ likely first single. Both songs, of course, feature his man-meets-machine vocals. “Auto-Tune’s stuck with me,” Pain says, grinning at last. “People told me to stop using it, but I would not stop. It works!”

That’s right, for all you Jimi Hendrix fans out there, including tokagowa, he’s heading for Guitar Hero: World Tour. The Seattle company, Experience Hendrix, which controls Jimi’s rock music legacy, is providing Hendrix’s music, including masters such as “Purple Haze,” “Foxy Lady,” and “Little Wing,” and likeness in the new Guitar Hero game. Aaron Grant, spokesman for Activision and RedOctane told the Press:

“It’s the first time Hendrix’s likeness will be showcased in the game.”

A playable avatar of Hendrix, as well as the song “The Wind Cries Mary”and a LIVE version of “Purple Haze”recorded in 1969 at the San Diego Sports Arena, will be included in GH 4. Besides these in-game songs and what not, Experience Hendrix provided Activision and RedOctane with songs that will be released in the future as downloadable content, Grant said.

today is a special day because two of video gaming’s head-honchos square off today in what is a do or die battle royal. sony’s PS3 hasnt been doing well while the big n’s wii has been selling faster than anything thats autographed by Chuck Norris.

sick jj rider

First off, Nintendo.
Going into this press confrence, people were expecting Nintendo to announce somthing gigantic, but they seemed to rely on that “games for everone” crap. they did, however, announce a new Animal Crossing game as well as a Grand Theft Auto game, yes GRAND THEFT AUTO, for the DS.
what can turn out to be a giant sleeper in the video game world is Animal Crossing: City Folk. i got the first Animal Crossing for the gamecube and i, and the rest of the world, fell in love with the game. the fact that they have made a new game for the wii shows that Nintendo remembers what made them what they are today, and that is fun, innovation, and originality. lately, there has been speculation of the new Animal Crossing game and now that Nintendo has confirmed it millions of people will get this game, as well as a new microphone that connects to the wiimote and allows you to talk to your friends on this game, as well as other smash hits like Super Smash Brothers: Brawl and Mario Kart Wii.
besides Animal Crossing, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown -something- (i hate subtitles). this is the first time GTA will hit the DS and i hope for Rock Star’s sake that it isnt a crappy game.

besides those games, nintendo kept on talking about how they would make (crappy) games for every gamer and that the games would be (crappy) easy to play. the only way nintendo has a chance at beating microsoft is by getting great games with super graphics.

Sony, on the other hand, just got crapped upon by Bill Gates himself. the main objectives for sony was to have a mega-hype/go to game (like the 360’s gears or halo franchises) and to find a way to redeem themselves for making people buy a second refridarator AND for copying nintendos motion sensitve controls.

they did sorta accomplish one of those objectives, and that was announcing God of War 3. this game may be the only thing to save the ps3 if it finds a way to take a crap on gears 2 (which i bet it wont). this game is the only game that i would by from sony’s press confrence, that is until they make Kingdom Hearts 3 since i am a HUMUNGOUS Kingdom Hearts fan. so if you dont have a ps3, dont rush to get one, wait for the reviews of God of War 3 and maybe a helluav a lot more great games to hit the ps3.

so, here are what i think the scores of the big threes preformance at E3’08:

1. Microsoft (5 locus things getting curbed stomped out of 5)

2. Nintendo (3.5 fariyes circling around Link’s head out of 5)

3. Sony (for getting crapped on by nintendo. since when does nintendo take craps on companies? they get 1.5 out of 5)

Today was the first day of the E3 convention, which is basicity a herding ground for nerds, geeks, and everything in between. the first, and only company to crush rumors, and/or approve them.

the first game to debut at E3 was Fallout 3, which is basicity oblivion set in modern day times. to be completely honest, i wasnt necessarily blown away by the game, it tried to be funny to much and lacked an adrenal burst. the game is set in a post apocalyptic washington DC during the year 2235 or so. the game has over 100 hours of gameplay and a boatload of downloadable content. the game also has a lot of different weapons that you can use to wreak havoc with, but the bad thing about using these weapons is that somebody at the production studio thought it would cool to allow the player to completely stop the game and use a robot to target the enemy’s head for a perfect shot every time. this is what castrated the game of any balls it had left. the point is, Fallout 3 is just oblivion set in the year 2235. JUST FROM THIS TRAILER, id say that the game is a rent.

another game that was shown in a demo format was Resident Evil 5, which looks like a major upgrade from the already awesome Resident Evil 4. the story-line is the same where you have to kill zombies. the demo looked pretty nice, the only bad thing i saw was the zombies. not graphicly, but they were so slow and it took like three rounds just to kill one. it made me think that if these zombies were real, all you would have to do is drive a hummer right over their undead asses. anyway, i will be sure to either rent or buy RE5, mostly because of its online co-op mode that is a first for the series.

o hells yeah

rfollowing the zombie/horror type thing, Gears 2 had a new demo that made me sad that we have to wait for November 7th to get a taste of this orgasmic game. thats the best way i can put it without going x-rated. the new demo showed a flamethrower that is WAY better than the one in halo 3 and MAYBE a chance to ride one of those ugly burmaks that have every weapon of mass destruction tied on its back. the hammer of dawn made a repeat showing and the locus seem to be everywhere. there was even a part where marcus had to use a super turrent to take out a whole army (which is playable by the way, not a cut scene) of advancing locus. the downlow on this game is: BUY IT. PERIOD. i dont care if you have a date with the newest miss universe, cancel it and camp out for this game because IT WILL BE BIGGER THAN HALO 3.

another hyped game that was demoed was Fable 2. this game puts an interesting twist on the worn-out RPG genre. thats because this game allows you to interact like no other game has before. i mean, you can be a super bad-ass and the people in the game will treat you differently than they would a goody-goody-2 shoes. the cool thing about this game is that you can invite friends who are playing in their world into your own so that they can interact with the world in their way. so i suggest that you and your friend buy this game, then go kick some granny ass. this is a must have after you have stood in line for three days to get gears 2.

Rock Band 2 also officially released all the tracks that would be playable on rock band 2, AND that ACDC would make a video game debut exclusively on rock band 2. but before rock band annouced that, Guitar Hero Wold Tour announced that Metalica would be on GHWT exclusively. this seems like the year that you and your punk-rock wannabe friends put a tv in the garage and buy both GHWT and Rock Band 2 because this year, these two games will duke it out to the death. i cant see a clear winner.

nice

microsoft also had a little trick up their sleeve, which turned out to be a MAJOR upgrade to the xbox 360s main menu. the upgrade makes the dashboard into five boxes that can be scrolled left and right, resembling windows vista and apples cover-art flow. the upgrade also lets users create 3d avatars that look a lot like nintendos miis. the avatars have many changeable appearances and the cool thing about it is that when your friends show up online, thier avatar shows up with yours and you can im, send videos, and photos with them. this update is supposed to be avaiable next month.
all in all, bill gates will definately be getting richer in the next, o lets say 9999898549696 years or so. microsoft proved that they are the company to beat, and i believe that unless sony can do something amazing, then they will be out of the picture for console supremacy. nintendo will challange microsoft but most likely fail due to the lack of 5 star games and way-to-many-to-count crap games for its smash hit, wii. i am looking forward to seeing nintendo and sony butt heads tomorow.
-tokagowa

Yes, this is a real guitar, in fact it, is used by guitarist Pat Metheny in many songs, including his song Into the Dream. It is a 42 string, three neck acoustic guitar called the Pikasso Guitar, or the Picasso I. It is custom made, so don’t go looking around in your nearest Guitar Center for one, and made by Canadian luthier Linda Manzer (luthier is someone who repairs stringed instruments). It is called Pikasso probably because of the cubist works of Pablo Picasso. On stage, it’s about the size of a school-band drum.

I just saw the movie “Wanted” today, and, lemme tell, this movie is turining some heads and it’s going to be one of the summer hits this year. This movie had plenty of action and a gore scale up there with “Saving Private Ryan”. This movie was loaded with twists that noone really expected at all, not even me. It had a great storyline that didn’t require much thought to understand. Trusty Wikipedia will give you a pretty good review of the entire plot (even though you guys want to hear my review more), but, it does leave out some big details and some little ones, but i HIGHLY suggest you go see this movie so that you can fully understand it’s greatness and see for yourself all the twists and turns i’ve talked to you about. CAUTION: THIS REVIEW WILL GIVE AWAY ALOT ABOUT THIS MOVIE, I WOULD CONSIDER THIS TO BE A SPOILER REVIEW!

The film opens with a man meeting with a ballistics expert, attempting to find out who made a particular bullet for a “competitor”. The conversation is interrupted by a sniper shooting the ballistics expert through the head from a nearby building. The man then dashes down the corridor and leaps through the window, shooting and killing his opponents in mid-flight. The man then receives a phone call from a man he calls Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). Cross tells the man that the snipers were decoys. Cross then fires a multi-stage bullet through the man’s head from the window of a house across town.

The narrative then shifts to Wesley Allan Gibson (James McAvoy). Wesley hates his job as an account manager, where he endures regular verbal abuse from his annoying boss. Wesley, who suffers from panic attacks, also correctly suspects that his best friend and co-worker is having an affair with his shrewish girlfriend.

One night, at the pharmacy, Wesley meets a mysterious woman who tells him that his father was an elite assassin who had been killed the day before. Wesley does not believe this; he tells the woman that his father abandoned him a week after his birth. At that moment, Cross appears, gun in hand. The woman opens fire on Cross. Wesley and the woman escape from the resulting shoot-out and have a wild car chase in the streets of Chicago.

Wesley is brought to the headquarters of The Fraternity, a thousand-year-old secret society of assassins. The group’s leader, Sloan (Morgan Freeman), formally introduces Gibson to Fox (Angelina Jolie) the woman from the night before, and invites him to follow in his father’s footsteps as an assassin. Sloan tests Wesley by making him shoot the wings off a fly. When Wesley refuses, a gun is put to his head, triggering a panic attack. Wesley somehow manages to shoot the wings off several flies.

Sloan explains that Wesley’s panic attacks are actually a very rare ability that when under stress causes his heart to beat at an excess of 400 beats per minute, sending abundant amounts of adrenaline into his bloodstream. This allows them to see and react faster than normal. Sloan also tells Wesley that he had inherited his father’s vast fortune. Sloan offers Wesley his father’s position within The Fraternity and gifts him with his father’s gun. Wesley, pulling the gun on Sloan and the others, refuses and leaves.

Wesley wakes up the the next day hoping that everything was a dream, but discovers his father’s gun (which he stashes in the toilet tank). He also discovers $3.6 million in his bank account. Wesley tells off his boss and quits his job, knocking out his friend’s teeth with his keyboard as he leaves. Fox, who has been waiting for him outside, gives him a ride back to the Fraternity headquarters – an unassuming textile mill.

Wesley immediately begins training with the Fraternity, determined to avenge his father. He is taught to shoot, fight with knives, and is desensitized to pain with regular beatings. Wesley is also taught to “curve” bullets by slinging his gun in such a way that the bullet travels in a curve rather than a straight line. The training is brutal, and is only endurable with the assistance of periodic medicinal baths that accelerate healing.

With his training completed, Wesley is given orders to kill people from The Loom of Fate, a loom that gives the names of the targets through a binary code hidden in the weaving of the threads. While on his first assignment, Wesley seems to refuse to kill his target. He recalls an earlier conversation with Fox in which he opined that it isn’t right to kill people without knowing anything about them or why they deserve to die. Fox then told him her life story. Fox’s father was a judge who was handling a sensitive case and the defendant had put a hit on him. One day a hired killer held the young girl at knife point as they waited for her father to return home. The killer then lit the father on fire as the young girl watched. He later branded his initials into her neck. Fox explained that the man who killed her father had been targeted by the Fraternity several weeks prior to the events of the story, but their assassin had failed to carry out his duty. Wesley bends a bullet trajectory to kill the target a moment after this recollection.

Wesley later returns to his apartment to retrieve his father’s gun. He encounters Cross upon leaving the building. Gunfire is exchanged and Wesley pursues Cross. Wesley accidentally kills a fellow Fraternity member, a Russian bomb-maker named the Exterminator, in the process. Cross takes this opportunity to “curve” a bullet into Wesley’s arm.

Wesley analyzes the bullet from his arm and traces its origins. He determines that it is the work of a renegade Fraternity member named Pekwarsky (Terrence Stamp). Sloan grants Wesley permission to personally carry out the kill order on Cross despite Fox’s protests. After Wesley leaves, Sloan hands Fox a new kill order. It has Wesley’s name on it.

Wesley and Fox travel to the Fraternity’s original base of operations in Europe. The two easily capture Pekwarsky and force him to take them to Cross. The meeting leads to a confrontation between Wesley and Cross on a moving train. Fox steals a car and crashes it into the train, eventually causing the train to derail when it reaches a bridge over a deep ravine. Wesley is about to fall into the ravine before Cross catches his hand, saving his life. Wesley unhesitatingly shoots him. Before Cross dies, he tells Wesley that he is his real father and that the Fraternity had been lying to him. Fox confirms the truth and explains that Wesley was recruited because he was the only person that Cross wouldn’t kill. Fox then tells Wesley about the kill order on him and raises her weapon to shoot him. Wesley, however, shoots the glass underneath him and plunges into the river below.

Wesley awakes in an apartment across the street from his former apartment. He finds Pekwarsky there. Upon inspecting the apartment, he discovers it belonged to his father, who had been monitoring him his whole life. Pekwarsky hands Wesley a loom weaving and tells him to decode it. Wesley is shocked to discover Sloan’s name in the weaving. Pekwarsky explains that Cross went rogue due to this discovery. Since then Sloan has used false kill orders to direct the Fraternity as mere contract killers. Wesley realizes that Cross had never actually tried to kill him in their previous confrontations; he had been assassinating Fraternity members to keep them away from Wesley. Pekwarsky departs after giving Wesley plane tickets, stating that his father wished him a life free of violence.

While exploring the apartment further, Wesley discovers a secret room containing all of his father’s weapons and maps. He even finds a supply of The Exterminator’s mini-bombs, realizing that The Exterminator had been working with his father. Wesley then devises a plan to take out Sloan and the Fraternity.

Wesley begins the first phase of his plan by filling a garbage truck with rats gorged on explosives-laced peanut butter, “arming” a number of the rats with the Exterminator’s mini-bombs. He then crashes the truck into the Fraternity compound and releases the rats. After the rats explode, he charges in, killing all the Fraternity members he encounters. Upon entering Sloan’s office, he finds himself surrounded by Fox and her fellow master assassins. Wesley tells them that Sloan is killing for profit by providing his killers with fraudulent kill orders. He then attempts to kill Sloan, but is disarmed by Fox.

Fox asks Sloan if this is true. Sloan then reveals that all of their names had come up in the weaving, and that he had merely acted to protect them. He then goes on to explain that if they truly believe in the code then they should all commit suicide right where they stand. Otherwise, they should kill Wesley. The other assassins decide to kill Wesley, but Fox turns on her fellow assassins. She “curves” a bullet to kill the assassins who had been standing in a circle, including herself. Sloan escapes.

Wesley, penniless once more, does not know what to do with himself. While Wesley provides a voice-over, the audience sees a young man sitting in front of a computer in a cubicle much like Wesley did at the beginning of the film. The man types the name “Wesley Gibson” into Google and searches for it but does not have any results, as in the beginning of the film. Sloan appears and points a gun at the man’s head. At that moment, the man turns around and is revealed to be a decoy. Wesley, who is actually several miles away, then shoots Sloan in the head from the same window his father killed from at the beginning of the movie.

The movie ends with Wesley giving an overview of his last six weeks as an assassin: “What the fuck have you done lately?”

Again, this review does not explain everything about the film. I, again, suggest that you go and see the movie because it is amazing even if you read this.